tech talk

1. SlideShare i18n
Moving off Smartling

2. What’s all this about?
SlideShare was using a third party to serve localized pages at runtime
This was identified as a big security loophole by internal security team

3. Why security had a problem?

4. What’s the fix?
Move to internal localization stack.
Simple
Isn’t It?

5. Scale of problem
75 Million active users
~700 templates
LinkedIn and SlideShare stack differences
as SlideShare is built on Ruby

6. SlideShare web app repo is not a Multiproduct
Xmessage format is only supported format by LI i18n infra
Ruby doesn’t supports .properties files natively
SlideShare’s old version of ruby isn’t very encoding friendly
No native unicode escape support
No use of languages packs before
……….

7. So How to do it?
Initial Plan
Create some magic solution to crawl all code, find strings, generate
properties and send to i18n team

8. What would it lead to?
Confused Engineers
Missed strings
Lower quality extraction and translation
missing all goodies like pluralizations,
names and dates formatters and more.

9. So What did we do?
Started a POC on an [In]Day to verify the cost of creating Xmessage in Ruby
Agreed on manual extraction to ensure high quality
Decided to write custom properties file parser and custom i18n backend to use
them

10. From
To

11. Main Focus points
No resistance should be added in development process
Minimum or no new method calls
Keep response time unaffected
No significant delays in shipping code to production.
And remove Smartling ASAP as it’s a security issue

12. Main Focus points
No resistance should be added in development process
Minimum or no new method calls
Keep response time unaffected
No significant delays in shipping code to production.
And remove Smartling ASAP as it’s a security issue

13. No resistance in dev process
Created New repo for storing translations but tied it up with Main repo using Git
Hooks.
Pre-rebase and post-merge hooks ensure your translations are latest on dev
without any need to rebase

14. Main Focus points
No resistance should be added in development process
Minimum or no new method calls
Keep response time unaffected
No significant delays in shipping code to production.
And remove Smartling ASAP as it’s a security issue

15. No New method calls added
Everything happens behind I18n.t
Fetch from properties, Xmessage interpolation, Name, Date formatting all
behind the same method call

16. Main Focus points
No resistance should be added in development process
Minimum or no new method calls
Keep response time unaffected
No significant delays in shipping code to production.
And remove Smartling ASAP as it’s a security issue

17. Xmessage Benchmarking
Generally a page has ~10
strings with placeholders

18. Main Focus points
No resistance should be added in development process
Minimum or no new method calls
Keep response time unaffected
No significant delays in shipping code to production.
And remove Smartling ASAP as it’s a security issue

19. Need to create two RB’s
Need to push properties files separately but no deploy step for translations repo
keeps the process smooth

20. How 700 templates were localized?
Created detailed documentation for team
Conducted a Hands-on/demo to teach devs new workflow
Created ~700 tickets using JIRA API
Did two string extraction bashes and rewarded whoever localized the most
Most of the issues created by L10n team were resolved within two days

21. Created detailed documentation
The team was new to this stack
Never created properties files before
Never used Xmessage placeholders before
New flow for pushing translations

22. Best Practices

23. Involved L10n team at every step

24. In Documentation Reviews
L10n engineering team reviewed our documentation and suggested needed edits
before we released it to team

25. Code Reviews by L10n team
Did our code reviews - Masha’s review rate was much higher than mine
Code Reviews by L10n team helped us catch errors much early and iterate
faster
Every code review taught us best practices and raised the quality bar amongst
the team

26. Decided on complex patterns much earlier
user.message={:type,map,MEMBER#Hello, {:value,name,full}|COMPANY#Hello,
{:value}|DEFAULT_TEXT#Hello, {:user_login}}

27. Avoid XSS
At every step ensure that you don’t insert broken HTML and take special care of
quotes
Do it before security finds it

28. Write tons of tests
80 UITF tests for EN
~400 Tests for Xmessage
40 tests for new i18n backend
Added 80 for each of the languages which SlideShare supports

29. Be Available
Most of the queries resolved on slack
Most of the discussions done on slack

30. Resolve issues as soon as they come
Most of the issues resolved within 1-2 days to maintain the pace

31. The Timeline

32. Questions